Food For Thought Fridays: Spotting your Talents in Action

Happy Friday and hope you all had a fabulous week!

For today's "Food For Thought", I want to share a learning from a development session I had the opportunity to participate in with a few colleagues from work. It was a two hour session where we talked about Clifton Strengths and uncovering our true YOU.

Haven't heard of Clifton Strengths? Here is their website and talks about the assessment you take to uncover your Top Strengths: https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/253676/how-cliftonstrengths-works.aspx . The formula used to derive your strengths is the following: Talent & Investment = Strength. Talent is "a natural way of thinking, feeling or behaving". Investment is "time spent practicing, developing your skills and building your knowledge base".

"To turn those talents into strengths, you must invest in them -- practice using them and add knowledge and skills to them."

Our natural instinct is to focus on "fixing" our weaknesses and dismissing those things that we do very well. In addition, when asked "How do you do that? You are great at this ... what's your secret?" -- we don't know how to express it and say "I don't know, just happened!". Understanding what our strengths are help us determine how to best develop them to reach our authentic selfs and true potential. I highly encourage you to invest in the assessment so that you can highlight your strengths to your leader, team and even your significant other.

Now that you know a little bit about Clifton Strengths, I want to share one of the many take-aways from today's session and my goal is to do this at least twice a year. It's called "Spotting your talents in Action." Even if you don't take the assessment, it's a pretty interesting exercise to determine where you are investing your time today.

Here is what you do:

1. Create two columns on a piece of paper. One column is Red - The other column is Green.

2. Journal for a whole week and categorize each activity based on the below questions:

   1. What do you look forward to doing?

   2. What are you doing when time flies by?

   3. What can't you wait to do again?

   4. When you thought "how did I do that"?

   5. What do you pick up quickly?

   6. What makes you feel strong?

3. The activities that fall within the above 6 questions, you would categorize them as Green.

4. For any activities that you are feeling quite the opposite, you would categorize them as Red.

   1. What am I not looking forward to doing?

   2. Activity that make you feel like time stood still

   3. Things you never want to do again

   4. Things that take a long time to learn or seem impossible

   5. Things that make you feel insecure

5. At the end of the week, try to quantify how much time you are spending in the red versus green.

By doing this, it allows us the opportunity to look back and reflect on where we are spending most of our time. What things am I doing that are bringing out my natural talents and am I practicing them often enough to turn them into a strength. It's very rare for us to stop at the end of the week, look back and ask ourselves "I really enjoyed doing this ...". This short homework assignment allows us to do exactly that and get to know our talents a bit more. Which in turn, will help guide our career and development conversations.

I leave you with one final thought:

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” ― Dr. Seuss"

Take the time to learn what your true talents are and practice, practice, practice them! :)